Veni, vidi, vici.

I came, I saw, I conquered.(something Julius Ceaser said...lol)  Seemed very fitting for today's post.

Lazy morning, a slow start. Another cup of wonderful coffee to start the day, damn! The Italians make heart-lifting coffee. The mission for the day was to see all the things that we missed yesterday, starting with the Vatican. En route, we got distracted: on the first day that we arrived in Rome I saw this bag with a map on it, I saw it again and again. This antique map designer looking bag which now that I have looking on Google for it realized that it has been made by Alviero Martini. By this point of my trip I wanted it but I couldn't find one that fitted me like the old lady purses, luggage and mini bags. When walking towards St.Peter's we passed a stand that had a courier bag just like I wanted, 20 Euros instead of whatever the designer price was for it. *smiles* Enough about bags.

As we got nearer to the Vatican we got heckled by tour guides left right and centre, most of them were really friendly then again they are meant to be. They were a pushy and avoiding them seemed nearly impossible. For 40 Euros they would provide tickets into the Vatican Museum & Sistine Chapel with a guide for two hours. Since Danny and I didn't have enough money to get into a line we needed directions to the bank machine which was the local post office.

ARGH! My bank card didn't work. Danny had to take out money for the both of us, maybe I shouldn't have bought that purse after all. Naw.  Fending off more tour guides, we decided to join the long queue snaking across Piazza San Pietro. This queue, which most of the nearby guides had been using the ability to skip as their main selling point, actually moved super fast and got us in and out of St. Peter's Basilica in 45 minutes. 

The scale of the place is really quite something.

Official Vatican guards in their fancy uniforms.

Bemused but grateful of the anti-climactic time spent standing in line, we decided to find the entrance to the museum proper, under the assumption that the really awful line must be there. When we found said entrance, there was absolutely nobody waiting and we were able to waltz straight in. Moral of the story; don't let the guides trick you into paying them money unless you actually want to hear what they have to say, because - unless we were just lucky - there aren't any lines worth skipping. Still, we did find out from them that I could get a concession ticket with my ancient student card, so that was nice.


The Vatican Museum is crazy big and also includes the Sistine Chapel and free access to the Vatican gardens, which are nice on a sunny day - it's well worth the 15 / 8 conc. Euro price tag. Having successfully entered, we took some time to get kinda boring pizza from the cafeteria, to replenish our energy for the long trek ahead.

Aboriginal carving of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent deity. After all those Roman sculptures it was nice to see something a bit different.

Ancient picnic Bento!

The School of Athens - a famous fresco of the Greek philosophers, with Plato and Aristotle in the centre.

Dali tries his hand at religious imagery.

Many hundreds of rooms and thousands of miles later, after passing lots and lots of extravagant wall hangings, a room full of massive maps of Italy, tonnes of sculptures, a bronze globe, a Bento box and a collection of Pope-based stamps, we arrived in the Sistine Chapel, which is decorated from floor to ceiling with a mind-blowing amount of art courtesy of Michaelangelo. Like the Pantheon yesterday, the visitors were constantly being shushed as the chapel is a sacred place (also like the Pantheon, it didn't do much good). The artistic assault on the senses from all directions was quite foreboding, although the effect was lessened slightly as the room was packed with tourists. Taking pictures was forbidden, but we sneakily took one anyway.

On the left is the Creation of Adam, the most well-known of the chapel's many images. 

Overall our time in the Vatican taught us one thing; that the place is built on excess. Just like most of Rome in general, there are very few areas that aren't lavishly decorated. Time to make an exit.